From today’s House vote advancing a bill cracking down on abuses by credit card companies:
“I haven’t heard any evidence that the competitive market isn’t working,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas. “In the absence of that, why are you attacking risk-based pricing?”
The next time you dash off an e-mail to a business executive, you might want to consider:
There’s a good chance the CEO, CFO or C-whatever will never see it. According to a 2009 survey conducted by the International Association of Administrative Professionals and the ePolicy Institute, there’s a 59 percent chance your message will be intercepted by an administrative assistant.
Those electronic gatekeepers are often asked to screen, delete and ghostwrite the boss’s e-mail.
And it’s on the increase.
Of the 614 administrative professionals surveyed, 59 percent said they ghostwrite responses, up from 43 percent in a 2002 survey.
Fifty-two percent said they read or screen executives’ incoming e-mail, twice the number reported seven years ago. Thirty-eight percent delete messages addressed to executives, up from 29 percent in 2002. Another 55 percent are authorized to use executives’ electronic signatures.
Nancy Flynn, executive director of ePolicy Institute, said 72 percent know that an electronic signature is “as legally binding as a hand-written signature.”
Ran across this interesting piece from Business Week, which doubles as a fairly strong indictment of business journalism. Sounds like the efforts to force gas prices back up are under way – again.
And, it reminds me of one of my pet peeves about television journalism: During the runup to $4 a gallon gas, invariably you’d find a TV reporter sitting in front of a commodities broker asking them the future of gas prices.
And equally invariably, the answer would be $5 a gallon. Or $6. Or $7. Or something typically self-serving.
Asking a commodities trader about the future of gas prices is a little bit like asking John Dillinger for a projection on bank robbery numbers nationwide.